I've got March by the nuts so far-- 4 days in and I've edited for 10.5 hours already. Woot!
I finished Act II and tacked it into the same file as Act I. Now I'm doing search function editing-- searching for commonly abused words and eliminating or rewriting as needed. So far I've done:
suddenly
very
really
every, everyone, everything (holy crap did I have a ton of these)
that
felt
realized
saw
This kind of editing is fun like cleaning out your junk closet is fun. It's not like you look forward to doing it, but once you get on a roll it's deeply satisfying to chuck all this crap cluttering up your life. I've cut more than 1,500 words (weak, crappy words mourned by nobody), which blows my mind.
It's a little scary how insidious this stuff can be. Like, I know you're not supposed to use suddenly. I read once that you can get away with it twice in a whole novel. I would have sworn I only used it twice in TOB. Nope-- there were at least twenty! Same thing with very, that, and really-- I was very sure that I really didn't use them much! ;)
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